Identity Resolution Market “on the Rise”
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
In case you missed it, leading data quality vendor Informatica announced last week that they are acquiring Identity Systems from its parent Nokia for approximately $85M in cash, validating a recent prediction by Gartner analyst Mark Beyer that “entity resolution and analysis” (aka Identity Resolution) products provide valuable benefits to user organizations, are part of a market space that’s “on the rise,” and will move fairly rapidly through the hype cycle to implementation.
What’s fueling the Identity Resolution space? Interestingly, it’s being driven by and in parallel with growth in some of the hottest enterprise software markets: Data Quality, MDM, BI, and CRM. Apparently in each market there’s an increasing recognition by commercial as well as government and law enforcement organizations of the need for Identity Resolution.
Commercial customers need to identify customers and increase their loyalty, drive profits, and gain competitive advantage, but most existing systems are unable to resolve multiple customer records into one without losing valuable data. Poor data quality costs U.S. businesses over $600 million annually, so the demand is growing rapidly for products that can bring together and resolve identity information from multiple disparate data sources in real time.
Likewise, investigators of commercial fraud in areas like organized retail crime and insurance claims fraud as well as government agencies like the Department of Homeland Services (DHS) need to combat fraudsters and criminals who are continuously trying to subvert existing software applications.
Almost immediately after Informatica’s announcement, market analyst firm Ovum issued an analysis of Informatica’s move. Then this morning, Phillip Howard at Bloor Research posted his thoughts regarding the impact of this acquisition on MDM and data quality players that include Oracle, Purisma, Siperian, Siebel, Trillium, Dataflux, and SAP, among others.
With all that’s happening in Identity Resolution right now, we’d like to hear what you think.
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